Hey, I have a great idea: Pinterest for web sites. Oh, wait.

August 14, 2012 2:21 PM

What is a good substitute for delicious?

I miss delicious. I know it still exists but its users are now so few that it's no longer useful for discovering new sites. Because it seems that nobody looks at it anymore, my enthusiasm for bookmarking there has also dwindled, even though I still enjoy browsing through the hundreds of sites that I have "saved" over the years. What do people use instead? I do have a pinboard account, but I don't see what it does that the current (crappy) incarnation of delicious does not.

posted by Wordwoman to Computers & Internet (18 answers total)

pinboard is good.
posted by gauche at 2:22 PM on August 14, 2012 [10 favorites]

Pinboard works exceedingly well for me. It isn't really for the social side (thus their tagline) but it has some major advantages over delicious:

- It's really fast
- The business model is clear
- The archive feature. OMG. This is really the one. No more dead links, archives pics and HTML really well. So worth the extra $$$.
posted by feckless at 2:24 PM on August 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

bit.ly is trying to replicate what delicious was originally trying to do. I have not yet learnt to appreciate it although I miss using delicious primarily because I was using bit.ly for a different reason/function which its now a fail.

Is there a free trial offer for pinboard?
posted by infini at 2:45 PM on August 14, 2012

StumbleUpon? Less bookmarky, more web recommendations.

I suggest that plus pinboard.
posted by itesser at 2:54 PM on August 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

I too miss the good old days of delicious. The interface is so clunky now, I had to move to pinboard. But I think your question disguises a presupposition that the same kind of thing even happens anymore. I'm not sure it ever will. Facebook and Twitter have the social bookmarking covered. News recently suggested that Facebook will begin offering a 'save this for later' button (a long overdue necessity in my opinion). BUT there are alternatives:

- I have to plug Twitter again. It has swallowed up my delicious, my blogging and created a whole new wealth of web dissemination for me. Discovery is what Twitter does best.
- Have you used Instapaper or Pocket? Instapaper sucks in your twitter and Facebook friends, allowing sharing to take place. Pocket even has tags! (that's sooooo 2005)
- How about foregoing just a Facebook profile. Instead, setup a page of your own dedicated to quality links. The same goes for twitter. Within a few months you'll have like-minded followers who give as much as they get.
- Tumblr has its link sharers. They are rarer than the image aggregators, but they are out there. Worth a look.
- Do you have an iPad or iPhone? Flipboard is good, but Zite is superb for hunting new stuff.
- Finally (and this is how I work) why not combine the whole lot!? Using ifttt I link all my accounts together. Anything I favourite on twitter gets saved to delicious, pinboard and Instapaper. I save articles I want to read from Zite to Instapaper, and also to twitter. Any time I tag an article in a certain way it will go the other way, from pinboard to a non-personal Facebook page; from delicious to my own LifePress archive. Multiple accounts, but only a couple of tweaks needed. More stuff than I can ever read.
posted by 0bvious at 2:54 PM on August 14, 2012 [7 favorites]

The network feature in Pinboard still has the potential for discovery much like Delicious in its heyday. I have little interest in the programming and design stuff that dominates the popular tag, but after following many interesting users from the MeFi Social Explorer, my network (which can be completely private, mind) fills up daily with interesting new content I'd have never found otherwise.
posted by Lorin at 3:00 PM on August 14, 2012

I used to use Delicious a lot for bookmarking online recipes. I used the tag feature to tags things like "chicken", "soup", "crockpot", etc. So that when I was craving something chicken and needed something that could be made in the crockpot I could find it easily.

When Delicious changed to their current format, which took away the ability to search your own tags, I migrated all my bookmarks to Evernote. The bonus is that I now have those bookmarks on my phone and can get them at all times.
posted by Brittanie at 3:43 PM on August 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

I use Zootool. But I'm considering moving to Gimme Bar. Springpad is yet another, and their iPad app is awesome, but the web interface frustrated me (couple months ago). I believe it has more users than either Zootool or Gimme Bar, though.

All of these let you import delicious format.
posted by miscbuff at 3:46 PM on August 14, 2012

I wonder if Gmail would work.

In other words, lets say you had a bookmarklet or extension. With one click or keystroke, it would strip out most of the formatting of a page, and just email a full-text copy to your gmail account. No muss, no fuss. Gmail as you probably know is very searchable, and you could always go in later and tag/organize the pages however you want.

Is such a thing possible?
posted by Alaska Jack at 3:47 PM on August 14, 2012

One of del.icio.us' functionalities was the ability to create and use your own tags, and thus sort by them as well as blog links from certain tags as well as share them. Gmail would be clumsy for that function.
posted by infini at 4:04 PM on August 14, 2012

I used Delicious all the time but love Pinboard now. I wasn't crazy about it at first but I actually like it better.
posted by trillian at 5:06 PM on August 14, 2012

What Alaska Jack is looking for is (I think) achieved with a combination of Clearly plus Evernote.
posted by yclipse at 6:02 PM on August 14, 2012

A lot of MeFi folk moved to pinboard all at once, do a search for that post and you'll discover loads of new things.
posted by tommasz at 6:20 PM on August 14, 2012

For saving and tagging I've switched to Pocket.

I never found Delicious effective for discovery - well, maybe around 2005 - but Twitter and Google alerts fill that role pretty nicely now.
posted by 23 at 6:35 PM on August 14, 2012

Everyone in the school library world circles I run in moved to diigo from delicious including me.
posted by momochan at 7:12 PM on August 14, 2012

I, for one, still use Delicious. You can still tag your saved links and search your own links by tag. Or you can search everybody else's tags. You can follow another person, or share your links. It works just fine, thankyouverymuch.
Delicious separated from Yahoo last year and got a completely new web site.
As I recall, the first few days of del.icio.us's existence, nine years ago, were the time to watch everyone's saved links scroll down, but after that it turned into a fire hose and wasn't fun any more.
posted by exphysicist345 at 11:29 PM on August 14, 2012

I like zootool simply for the fact it shows pictures which delicious never did. Also zootool bookmark allows you to post to delicious too, so you can have a backup just in case. However, not the best for discovery as delicious was. Stumbleupon is decent for that although dated. Evernote and Springpad are bookmark more for your personal stuff(leaving notes, planning wedding,party , project ideas),not in my opinion for large scale web bookmarks tagged and grouped like delicious.
posted by radsqd at 1:10 PM on August 15, 2012

Oh, and delicious shows pictures now.
posted by exphysicist345 at 6:33 PM on August 15, 2012